Mum blocked for 'stealing' friend's baby name

Ariane Beeston

Feb 25 2019 at 11:30 AM

Mum blocked for 'stealing' friend's baby name.
Photo: Alamy

Choosing a baby name is fraught at the best of times, but what happens when the moniker you decide on results in a broken friendship?That's exactly what happened to one woman who took to the forum Mumsnet with her story.

"I've recently had a baby boy and my husband had chosen a name that we both liked," she writes, adding that although the moniker meant a lot to her husband, it's also the name of her friend's six-year-old son.

As her pregnancy progressed, the name continued to top their list, so the mum decided to ask her friend if she was okay with them using it. "For context, my friend has never met my partner or been to my house," she writes. "I see her about three - four times a year which I tend to instigate and we don't live in the same area."

The friend replied that she didn't mind, adding that "finding names is hard."

Not long after her son was born, however, the woman noticed that her mate had deleted her from social media. " I found out from a mutual friend she was hurt that we had called our son the same name as her son," the poster writes. "She hasn't spoken to me directly about this and I feel incredibly offended that she has deleted me and obviously can't bear to look at any pictures of our baby who shares the same name as her son."

While she didn't reveal the name, the poster noted that it was "fairly common".

"Would you react this way?" she asked the forum.

And the general consensus was "hell no."

"Names don't belong to anyone as sole possessor, and you'd asked her and she'd said OK!" one mum wrote. "She's got nothing to feel hurt over."

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"She's done you a favour blocking you," said another. "People that oversensitive will not ever bring much joy into your life!"

Others shared their own baby name "horror" stories. "A cousin told me that I couldn't use the name I wanted for my son because she'd used it for her son several years before," one woman wrote. "It was my deceased father's name!"

But not everyone was quite so easygoing. "I'm pissed off because there's thousands of names to choose from but my partner's best friend is wanting to call his baby a diminutive of our baby's name if they have a boy," another mum said. "I'm literally praying they have a girl. I know general consensus is that nobody owns a name but it can take months to lovingly choose a name for your child so it's irritating when a friend decides to copy."

"If one of my best friends that I see weekly and have regular play dates used my daughter's name I'd be a bit annoyed, or if it was a very unusual name," admitted another.

A 2018 survey conducted by BabyCenter found that one in five mums-to-be ends up considering a different baby name because someone "stole" the one she originally chose.

But while baby name "theft" might seem like a modern phenomenon, it was actually the subject of a Seinfeld episode back in the 90s. In it, George, played by Jason Alexander, tells his partner, Susan, that he wants to name their future child "Seven". While Susan gives the name a hard pass, her pregnant cousin loves it and decides to use it for their baby, much to George's dismay.